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John Dewey

John Dewey (1859-1952) was a United States pragmatic philosopher who advocated progressive education.

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We only think when we are confronted with problems.

– John Dewey

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Anyone who has begun to think places some portion of the world in jeopardy.

– John Dewey

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Intellectually, religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it.

– John Dewey

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Social engaged intellectuals must accept reality as they found it and shape it toward positive social goals, not stand aside in self-righteous isolation.

– John Dewey

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All genuine learning comes through experience.

– John Dewey

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Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent.

– John Dewey

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Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.

– John Dewey

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Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is, not a preparation for life; education is life itself.

– John Dewey

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Instruction is important.

– John Dewey

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Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.

– John Dewey

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Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis.

– John Dewey

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Education is life itself.

– John Dewey

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We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.

– John Dewey

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It is our American habit if we find the foundations of our educational structure unsatisfactory to add another story or wing. We find it easier to add a new study or course or kind of school than to recognize existing conditions so as to meet the need.

– John Dewey

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There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication.... Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your experience changing.

– John Dewey

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Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.

– John Dewey

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Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

– John Dewey

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We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique.

– John Dewey

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To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.

– John Dewey

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Americans don't want to think. They want to know.

– John Dewey

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Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment.

– John Dewey

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Intellectually, religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves to the current view of the world and consecrate it.

– John Dewey

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Luck, bad if not good, will always be with us. But it has a way of favoring the intelligent and showing its back to the stupid.

– John Dewey

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Modern life means democracy, democracy means freeing intelligence for independent effectivenessthe emancipation of mind as an individual organ to do its own work. We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos.

– John Dewey

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Of what use, educationally speaking, is it to be able to see the end in the beginning?

– John Dewey

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The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.

– John Dewey

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The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs. Self-conceit often regards it as a sign of weakness to admit that a belief to which we have once committed ourselves is wrong. We get so identified with an idea that it is literally a pet notion and we rise to its defense and stop our eyes and ears to anything different.

– John Dewey

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The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.

– John Dewey

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There is no discipline in the world so severe as the discipline of experience subjected to the tests of intelligent development and direction.

– John Dewey

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